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Friday, November 6, 2015

It's pretty clear that most of the Chicago Smash 4 scene is new. Not many people came into the scene with backgrounds in competitive Smash. In fact, 70% of our top 10 started competitive smash with Smash 4 (Shel, JTWild, Dan, NiTe, Demitus, Big_Mak, etc.). I find it interesting that even though this is their first competitive game, there is a handful of players that dominate the scene and consistently beat everyone else who is trying to make their break through to reach the top 10. These top players have been playing the game the exact same amount of time as anyone else in the scene, but why are they so much better than the average player? I see so many people put hours upon hours into this game with little results, while this select few are blazing past the rest of the competition. Why is that?

Friday, July 10, 2015

Just a few months ago, the only Smash 4 tournaments in
Chicago were E2C's monthly tournaments. Since then, the scene has ballooned in
size, and weekly tournaments have been popping up all over the place, allowing
players to get in tournament practice every week. As of the writing of this
post, there are 9 weeklies in the Chicagoland area for Smash 4 that I am aware
of, with at least one tournament every day of the week except for Wednesdays. In
the past two weeks I have attended all of the weeklies that I could, and after
having attended almost all of the available tournaments, I have put together my
list of the top five weeklies. I ranked the tournaments based on the following
criteria: quality of venue, strength of the competition, the number of set ups,
how well the tournaments are ran, and of course my own opinion. Without further
adieu, here is JJROCKETS' list of the best weekly tournaments in Chicago!

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

I'm a week behind on my blog posts already, so this post for Smash n' Splash may not be as detailed as the others, my apologies. Or maybe my posts are too long anyways and you'll actually be able to read this entire thing, who knows?

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

On the Thursday before week three of the Summer of Smash, I
actually wasn't sure of which tournament I was even going to for the weekend.
There was one in Davenport, IA that some people from IL were driving to, but I
knew that tournament would be relatively small and still a couple hours away. It
made no sense for me to go to that when a tournament of about the same size was
happening in Chicago that same day anyways. If I were to be traveling this
weekend, I may as well go to Michigan for Rebirth IV which was looking to be
80+ attendants including some of the best players in the region. Since I've
never been to Michigan for a tourney, I really wanted to make it out to
Rebirth, but organizing a carpool was near impossible because everyone just
wanted to go to Davenport for some reason. I asked around and eventually got
Slow Joe and Hoenn in on going to Michigan, and on Friday as a last minute
Razor joined our carpool.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

So week two of The Summer of Smash has come to a close after another 3 days straight of Smash. This post is going to be really long again; I'm pretty much just writing whatever comes to my head as I remember it, so some of it might not end up making any sense at all. You've been warned.

The Summer of Smash began on such a high note that I don't even know where to begin with this post. Since Combo Breaker is more known for its fighting game tournaments, I really didn't know what to expect going into it.

I am Benjamin "JJROCKETS" Rowe, a Smash Ultimate Diddy Kong main from Chicago, IL. Currently I live in Daejeon, Korea where I work as an elementary school English teacher. In Brawl and Smash 4, I was known as one of the top Diddy Kong players, and I am looking to continue this success in Ultimate. On my website I will be posting about my travels in Asia, my Smash Ultimate tournament experiences, guides on how to improve at Smash, and random thoughts about life. Besides blog style posts, I also have my tournament schedule with my upcoming events listed, and a compilation of my tournament results in Ultimate.